Piano Improvisation starts here!
Have you ever thought: “How excellent would it be to sit at a piano and play any melody that comes into my mind – without any notes?”
Or: What do I do when my band wants me to take a Piano Solo?
Piano improvisation, is the art of spontaneously playing melodies on the piano at the spur of the moment.
You may think it is domain of few very creative, experienced, and gifted musicians and thus unreachable for hobbist musicians or beginners. However......
I believe if you read on and go through some of the suggestion contained in these lessons that you or anyone can begin to learn this awesome skill.
Just a beginner?
That may actually be an advantage! Many classically trained sight readers have difficulty with the concept of playing something not written on the page.
Beginners have no bad habits, no limiting beliefs about what is possible.
To learn piano improvisation, sight-reading skill is unnecessary beyond the ability to follow a treble clef melody.
Many professional piano players are not good sight-readers. They just don’t need to be.
Successful piano players know the key to improvisation is developing the connection between the brain and hands.
Once you develop that brain/hand connection your creativity can kick in and use you musical vocabulary that has already been learned and stored as muscle memory.
You can add to your musical vocabulary by working regularly on two things, the scales from which the chords of a tune are derived, and knowing effective chord voicings that sound good.
Although the more comfortable you get with piano exercises (chords and scales) the more creative freedom you will feel, you don't have to wait to begin to improvise on piano. I recommend you start right now!
The Benefits of Improvisation:
Scientists have discovered by monitoring the brains of individuals who were involved in the creative process of generating melodies and rhythms that several brain regions became highly activated especially one responsible for self expression.
Improvising also deactivated areas of the brain responsible for self -monitoring and area that would cause you to be distracted by external and irrelevant stimuli.
This means that the activity of improvisation is accompanied by a mental state of high, meditative concentration, where internal and external supervising processes are partly muted, permitting musical self expression.
Start Now!
Scientific investigation shows, that – independent of the age of the player – the brain begins to rewire itself after only a few weeks of improvisation practice at the piano.
And apart from this, there is a growing number of studies showing music making has a positive effect on the brain’s activities as it ages.
With a daily practice of free and creative piano playing, you could:
1. Create moments of relaxation, joy, and satisfaction,
2. Forget the stress of your work, and maybe even be more creative in your job, and
3. Train your creativity and start freely playing music with your friends.
With the proper technique for fingering chord and scale patterns, improvisation is actually much simpler you may think.
Whether you wish to play a jazz solo, a New Age composition, or a variation on a popular song melody or rock tune, a piano improvisation is merely a series of notes drawn from a musical scale that is already predetermined by the chords of the tune.
Additional Resources.
For more help woth improvisation on the piano you may want to check out the lessons below and check back often as new helpful lessons are added regularly.
The pentatonic scale.
Learn about this widely used improvisation scale and add a new dimension to you playing by clicking the link below
Learn the pentatonic scales and how to use them!
The Minor Pentatonic Scale.
Like the major pentatonic scale. the minor pentatonic is extremly useful when improvising. See video and learn by clicking the link below.
learn the Minor Pentatonic Scale
Pentatonic Scale Patterns.
Check out this great lesson on how to use basic piano pentatonic scale patterns to create interesting melodies and sols on keyboards.
Pentatonic Scale Patterns for Piano
The Blues Scale.
This lesson on the basic blues scale will give you the basic scale formula to be able to improvise over blues, rock, country and jazz songs. Clink the link below to begin.
Jazz Piano Improvisation.
This lesson uses the Jazz standard "There will never be another you" to teach using scales, chord tones and chord substitutions to help you Improvise Jazz Piano Click the link below to begin.
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